Bachmann's unlikely model: Dean

The party’s grass roots are radicalized. A blunt-talking, anti-establishment presidential candidate draws big summer crowds by pledging to confront the opposition party president. The political pros, fearing a general election disaster, grow more anxious by the day. Talk begins about how to arrest the outsider’s surge.

Michele Bachmann hasn’t declared yet that she’s running to represent “the Republican wing of the Republican Party,” but that’s all that’s missing from a presidential bid that bears more than a passing resemblance to Democrat Howard Dean’s in 2004.

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The kicker of her first ad in Iowa — “I will not vote to increase the debt ceiling” — shows the Minnesota congresswoman is betting that she can find the same sort of success as an insurgent taking on her party over spending as Dean did when Democrats felt their Washington leaders caved to George W. Bush in authorizing the Iraq war.

“Like Dean, she fits the mood and moment of her party,” said veteran Republican strategist Tucker Eskew.

The challenge for Bachmann is to avoid the same questions that plagued and ultimately undermined the former Vermont governor’s upstart campaign. In other words, if Mitt Romney represents John Kerry in the “Dated Dean, Married Kerry” bumper sticker slogan, how does Bachmann escape playing the role of Howard Dean?

As demonstrated by Dean’s failure in 2004 and Obama’s success four years later, there’s a difference between attracting large crowds and creating a campaign infrastructure that can turn out voters to win caucuses and primaries. One can start a movement with the first, but winning the nomination requires both.

Bachmann faces the same fundamental problem as Dean: the force powering her into contention — the base’s unalloyed contempt for a president they consider illegitimate — contains the seeds of her undoing.

“[Democratic primary voters] were still so afraid of what Bush could do in a second term that in the end they got pragmatic,” recalled Joe Trippi, who managed Dean’s campaign. “Obama engenders that same anxiety and fear within the Republican base.”

In some respects, Bachmann has an even steeper climb to the nomination than Dean. As Obama’s success against Hillary Clinton proved, the Democratic Party is open to nominating insurgents. There is no such history in the GOP.

The comparison, of course, is inexact. The entrance of Texas Gov. Rick Perry into the Republican race could siphon some of her tea party support. And while Dean was the only major Democrat running who opposed the Iraq War, Bachmann isn’t alone in positioning herself to the right of the GOP’s congressional wing.

“The entire field is going to end up sounding like her,” predicted longtime Democratic consultant Jim Jordan, who managed the early part of Kerry’s campaign.